King of Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar

No one of the points in which the Bible story has been corroborated by the recently discovered records is more impressive than that of the madness which afflicted the great king Nebuchadnezzar. His inscriptions could of course not be expected to make a positive statement that he was insane, but in the midst of his proud account of his building in Babylon--he was probably the greatest builder of all these ancient kings--there occurs abruptly the following significant passage: "For four years the capital of my kingdom did not rejoice my heart. In all my dominions I built no high place of magnificence, nor did I gather any treasure. In Babylon I erected no building for myself nor for the glory of my empire. In the worship of Bel-Marduk, my Lord, the joy of my heart, in Babylon, the city of his worship, I did not sing his praise. I did not sacrifice victims on his altar. In four years I did not repair the canals."

Those four years of joyless, unreligious idleness, the Bible tells us, were years of divine punishment. King Nebuchadnezzar had boasted to the prophet Daniel, "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built?" And straightway, that he might known how small he was, he was afflicted with the dread disease which doctors call lycanthropy, in which the victim thinks himself a beast. So that the king "did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws."

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